Anthropic says its AI models hacked 3 organizations during testing
[August 01, 2026] By
CHAN HO-HIM
Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three
other organizations during testing, just days after ChatGPT maker OpenAI
raised concerns over AI controls after it disclosed its rogue models
hacked another company.
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, posted on
its website Thursday that it discovered the three incidents after
reviewing more than 141,000 evaluation runs.
It had launched a “large-scale” cybersecurity review which specifically
looked for evidence whether its AI models were able to access the
internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed
off, in response to the OpenAI incident, Anthropic said.
Anthropic said the models involved in the incidents were Claude Opus
4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model. The earliest
incidents date to April, the AI company said.
“Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using
basic techniques,” Anthropic said, such as exploiting weak passwords.
In all three incidents, the AI models were tasked with a “capture the
flag” cybersecurity challenge, which Anthropic said has been one of the
ways it assesses a model’s cyber capabilities.
The models were given a fictional scenario and told a piece of secret
information, or the “flag,” had been hidden on a different machine on
the network with the objective of breaking in and retrieving it, it
said.
It added that it had already reached out to the affected organizations,
which it did not name. Two of them said they had not previously detected
the activity. Anthropic said it was “continuing to reach out to the
third.”
Anthropic said it conducted its review with Irregular, which describes
itself as the “first frontier security lab.”
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 “Addressing these risks will require
closer cooperation across the AI ecosystem,” Irregular said in a
post on X.
Last week, OpenAI said its AI models went rogue during an evaluation
of its models, breaking into the servers of AI startup Hugging Face.
OpenAI described it as a “significant security incident.”
These incidents have highlighted the
vulnerabilities in AI security and controls and raised questions
over how AI can be safely kept under human control as the
technology’s usage becomes more widespread globally.
Researchers have warned for years about risks from technology and
the need for stronger AI defensive engineering.
“Safety testing happens before a model is released precisely because
we don’t yet know what it is capable of,” Anthropic said on Thursday
on its website.
Kok Tin Gan, co-founder & CEO of cybersecurity firm NyxLab, which
specializes in cybersecurity and threat detection, believes there
will be more such incidents in the future.
“It is increasingly about governing what agents are available to the
AI, what authorities they possess, which actions require approval,
and how we ensure they remain within scope,” Gan said.
But the future of AI safety extends beyond just the safety of AI
models, he said.
“If we simply give the AI a goal and allow it to decide how to
achieve it, we should not be surprised when it takes actions that
technically satisfy the objective, but fall outside our intended
scope or expectations,” Gan said.
Therefore, stepping up the governance of the organizations and
authorities behind these AI models is going to be increasingly
important, he said.
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